UCL Institute of Archaeology

Beyond the Tribal Hidage

Beyond the Tribal Hidage

Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in southern England AD 400-750

Leverhulme Trust-funded Research Project 2006-9

Introduction

Within the period AD 400-750 dynamic cultural changes
saw localised ‘tribal’ groups coalesce into organised kingdoms or
provinces; a change captured in one of the few early-medieval documents
handed down to us: the Tribal Hidage. But, how did these
kingdoms come into being? What stimulated these changes in society? And
why were some kingdoms more successful than others? Although these
questions have long been of central concern to early medieval
historians, archaeological contributions to the debate have been are
rare. Given the relative paucity of written evidence for this
proto-historical and early historical period, this imbalance is rather
surprising. This is particularly noteworthy as the archaeological record
for the Anglo-Saxon cultural area in this period represents the richest
phase of furnished burial in British archaeology across much of Lowland
Britain.

Our pioneering project, Beyond the Tribal Hidage: Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in southern England AD 400-750,
funded by the Leverhulme Trust for three years starting in September
2006, argues that the archaeological evidence is of vital importance to
our present and future understanding of the first three centuries of the
Anglo-Saxon era. We will conduct the first systematic study of this
evidence at a broad regional scale. Quantification and analysis of
burial, settlement and findspot evidence, and an assessment of the
geographical context of these data, will address key questions regarding
the processes and timing of English state formation. No comparable
research of this type has been conducted in over thirty years, and none
has sought to unify the archaeological research resource produced in the
intervening period (e.g. excavation, and the Portable Antiquities
Scheme) and apply technologies new to the field (e.g. relational
database analysis within a GIS environment). In approach and intent this
ground-breaking project has potentially a major and significant
contribution to make to the study of a crucial and dynamic period.

Project aims and objectives

The aim of the project is to obtain a systematic
characterisation of the three kingdoms of the Jutes of Kent, the South
Saxons and the West Saxons in order to examine and compare regional and
temporal variation in identity and society accompanying the emergence of
early states. The research will adopt, for the first time, an
explicitly comparative approach to assess the scale, form and complexity
of neighbouring early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms; particularly as they relate
to social power and the category of the individual in social
construction. It will develop archaeological methods for defining the
physical and institutional basis of early-state economics, and assess
their relationship to agency and social dynamics.

It will adopt two mutually-sustaining approaches.
Firstly, the detailed and systematic examination of archaeological
evidence from each region will be studied for the first time using a
comprehensive and comparable methodology, including burial data,
archaeological evidence from excavated settlements, and find-spots of
stray finds, particularly those produced by, for example, the Portable
Antiquities Scheme (PAS). This research will provide data for a
comparative assessment of the social and economic organisation of
populations in southern England. Secondly, detailed analysis of the
regional landscape context of these data and their relationship to
settlement, local topography, land-ownership and food production regimes
over time, will enable us to identify the economic processes
underpinning state formation.

The originality of the proposed research derives from
both its scope and methodological approach to a fundamental, yet
neglected, topic. Although a substantial body of published work on
Anglo-Saxon state formation exists focussing primarily on evidence from
written sources, by contrast, archaeological research on the same theme
has been relatively rare. Equally, whilst archaeological evidence often
forms the basis of artefact studies and thematic syntheses (e.g. craft
production; urbanisation), few studies have previously attempted an
essentially archaeological approach to our understanding of the
development of societies to put alongside related historical research.
The significance of the project is that we will be able, for the first
time, to compare sites throughout all of the territories of several
early states on a like-by-like basis. It is argued that this new
perspective is crucial not only to our understanding of social,
political and economic organization within early kingdoms, but also to
our assessment of the dynamic relationships between them. It is
anticipated that our research will provide not only new interpretations
and clearer understanding of the processes of kingdom formation, but may
also bring to light previously unrecognised associations in the
material culture used to signify identities in burial. Furthermore, as a
model example of state-formation processes, the project will have
significant relevance to the study of comparable past societies in
different times and places on a global basis.

For a full version of the above text, including the project design click here.